I am running coding courses for kids in Germany. They often can’t speak English well enough. Is there a German version? How could one help improve or build a German version?
There are long term plans to translate freeCodeCamp into other languages, but it will take years to achieve. Because the curriculum itself is currently being rewritten, there aren’t current translation efforts (because all the work would have to be done over again).
We have students who use freeCodeCamp with automated translation through browser extensions. The difficulty that they run into is that the challenge tests often expect specific strings, and those strings are in English. An automatically translated page would tell your students to write “Hallo Welt!” but the tests would fail, looking for “Hello World!”.
freeCodeCamp is an open source project. If you have a lot of time and the help of some other intrepid German speakers, you can fork the project on GitHub and Deustch it up.
Since you mentioned kids, I also am obligated to remind you that although children are welcome to use freeCodeCamp without signing in, we cannot allow anyone under 13 to create an account. If you are running your own instance (in German or otherwise) you can handle those accounts yourself.
Sorry I didn’t have a more satisfying answer.
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If anyone is interested in working on a German version, I would love to get in contact and talk about it. #germanversionforgermankids
Hey there,
can you describe the problem of They often can’t speak English well enough in more detail?
Why I ask:
I’m also German and I teach web development to kids starting at age 10.
I invite them to FCC and english material in general, and I’ve never had a case with an english-problem. Sometimes it seemed to be an english-problem, but it was a I don't know how to help myself-problem.
I did a learn to help yourself-session, where I showed them how to use deepl and google if they don’t understand some terms. The feedback was great and they learned a meta skill they can use outside of programming, too.
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I agree with you. Children of 10 can master this. It’s inconvenient though. And you may know, that even adults sometimes do not understand English well. It’s not okay in Germany to not know English. But it’s more widespread than a lot of people admit.
Getting a German version is like a UX upgrade. It’s not essential. But it’s helping learners. And for freeCodeCamp it’s a doable task, I guess. I do understand, that it’s a lot of work and it would need enough people interested in doing it.
I also understand if this is not of highest priority for the community.
I have mixed feelings with this one. I’m on the Yes, having this stuff in german feels easier at first, but on the long run, you have to learn english and this is a good learning opportunity.-site.
E.g. we started to translate the ReactJS docs in 2019. If you’re not able to adapt to this fact (= translation started 6(!) years after birth), then you’ll probably have a hard time, because you’ll always have to wait for the german translation of some framework/library/tool. You’ll also decrease the amount of help you can get.
I am trying to establish coding practice in schools. It would be very helpful to have a rock solid solution. That would be a translation not a browser that tries to translate. I agree, that it would be “too much” to offer it all in German. Maybe just the first 100 hours?
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that would be the whole first certificate challenges and the first project
anyway, the curriculum is going to be overhauled soon, it’s going to be completely project based
anyway, you could try to give them exposure to english, it would mean both learn english and learn to code
I think the English version is okay from 5th or 6th grade on. Especially in elementary school (Grundschule, 1st through 4th grade) it’s not feasible. Maybe code.org will have to do there. It’s more visual anyways.
A basic German version of the first courses / projects would be helpful to increase adoption. I am sure of that.
Yes, we agree that having freeCodeCamp in different languages would be amazing. If you can find people who have the technical and language skills to create and maintain the translation, then you are welcome to do it, by all means.
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That’s the perfect answer. I am really interested in making this happen. I do have some funds to support such a movement. I am not technically literate enough to understand, what it means when you refer to technical skills.
My understanding is, that the current github project does not yet support multiple languages. Would “technical skills” involve to create a basic implementation for I18N support as well?
Could you specify, what I need specifically to start such an endeavour? Or should we just fork and come back with a pull request once we think we have a valid solution?
the chinese translation is ongoing, what they are doing is taking each page, and create a new page in chinese
there is too much checking what’s on the page to easily allow for complete translation on the same page
they are also at it for… years?
not even near to completion
here there is a folder for each language that ever tried at it: https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp/tree/master/curriculum/challenges
if you want to start somewhere and enter in the habit of transalting technical language, why not the docs? https://github.com/freeCodeCamp/freeCodeCamp/tree/master/docs
in the i18n-languages folder there are the docs in various languages, to make contributing more accessible, there are not all files that are present in english, so maybe that could be a start, bring up to date the existing ones and translate some others
Sounds good. Will look into this and try to start. Is there anyone to go to once I get stick and have questions?
do you mean about the translations? about the contributing process in general?
for contribution you can refer to the contributing docs
if you need help, there are the #contribute subforum here on the forum, or the contributors channel in the discord server, or the contributors gitter room
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I have asked internally in our organization, if anyone is interested in helping with this. Will be back eventually. Thanks for helping out. Feels like a great community.
I have now shopped around intern a little and was surprised of how well the idea was perceived by our engineers. I have 5 engineers who are happy to volunteer and help. In a recent discussion we talked about whether it could be possible to offer to create some sort of universal translation solution via a solution that helps non-tech people like me do the translation with a visual abstraction layer and offer community-driven correction processes while not interfering with software development too much.
For example Crowdin offers their services for free for projects like freeCodeCamp and I know that Khan Academy use them as a service.
The potential of such a bigger solution would be, that it could be universally used by all countries that do not speak English.
My question now is: Should we rather plan to do a small project like a quick German implementation to show off, that we can actually contribute to the community? Or would there be a project lead or someone willing to invest some time with us in exploring whether a bigger solution could be feasible?
I am new in this community. So I do not know how things are done here. Both ways are fine for us.
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if you have a big number of people wanting to partner up or something, maybe you will need to reach directly to the fcc team via email.
the contributing docs are mostly geared toward inidividual contribution
meanwhile everyone interested in contributing could start looking at the github issues and help with what they can
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What mail address would that be? #fccteam
Does anyone know? I am in a Hackathon with two developers for freeCodeCamp today. One element that I would love to do is to inform the creators of the platform of what we’re up to and offer an exchange and support. Will ping @QuincyLarson on twitter as well.
Argl. Found it here: team@freecodecamp.org